In a telecommunications network, a control center monitors computer alarms and troubleshoots these alarms on a digital cross-connect system. The good portion of the alarms that the technicians are required to troubleshoot are path and parity alarms. These alarms may be caused by several types of hardware in the digital cross-connect system. Due to the nature of the alarms, the identification of a single hardware card as the probable cause of the alarm is very labor intensive, especially in the case where more than one network-outbound port is experiencing the alarm.
In order to troubleshoot these alarms manually, the control center must first document all ports in alarm. Technicians must query the system and document all mapping that exists on the outbound ports in alarm (up to 24 mappings per port). Once the mapping is identified, a signal path through the digital cross-connect system must be manually determined for each mapping that is found. Once all of these paths are identified, the paths must manually be compared to one another determine the hardware most common to all the signal paths. Depending upon how many ports are in alarm, the manual process of troubleshooting the alarms may take many hours.